Shaping the life of your precious ones

In This Issue:

1. Dealing With Toddler Tantrums

2. Creating Toys From Recycled Household Items

3. Children’s learning styles

4. Christmas Holiday Gifts

Dealing With Toddler Tantrums

Between the ages of one and three, your previously gentle and loving toddler will have a change of personality. He will no longer be content to accept your rules for everything, but will want his own say in what he does and does not do. Quite frequently, this will result in toddler tantrums.

When a toddler starts having tantrums, the first thing the parents should do is decide what is important and what isn't important. If you want to have your own way in everything your toddler disagrees with, then you're likely to spend the majority of your time in a battle of wills. The best plan is to make as few rules as possible. Your child will be more likely to adhere to a lower number of rules and she will also know that those rules are important. Letting her get away with eating breakfast cereal with her fingers may be worth the mess if you know that she will definitely hold your hand to cross a road. Once you do decide what is important, don't give in. Make sure your rules are constant. If you make a rule that no biscuits may be eaten an hour before tea-time, stick by that rule, even if your toddler's cries are loud enough to annoy the neighbours. Once you give in and hand him a biscuit, he will expect one every time he cries.

A toddler has a tantrum to try and get what they want. If this usually works, they will continue to have tantrums. If, on the other, a tantrum never produces the result they want, they will soon give it up as ineffective.

The following are a number of things you can do when your child is in the middle of a tantrum, without having to give in:

1. Ignore him. Most tantrum-throwers are trying to attract attention. If you don't give him that attention, he will lose interest and stop the tantrum.

2. Send him to bed or to his room. This gives both of you a cooling down period.

3. Leave him. Obviously, don't take your eyes off the child if you do this in public.

4. Distract him. Start to play with a new toy, get your child a drink, go outside for a walk. Do whatever it takes to get your toddler's mind off the problem.

Toddler tantrums are an inevitable part of a child's development. They can't be completely avoided. But with some back-up options, hopefully the amount of time your child spends in a tantrum will be reduced.

For more on toddlers discipline, click HERE __________________________________________________________

Creating Toys From Recycled Household Items

The following are some ideas for creating Mind Stimulating Toys out of recycled household items:

1. Make a postbox for young children from an empty tissue box. Provide them with safe items such as plastic lids, plastic spoons, old credit cards, and small figurines and allow them to 'post' for endless hours of fun.

2. Make a clown. Wrap a big carton box with old gift wrappers. Draw a laughing clown face on a smaller box. Cut holes for the eyes and mouth. Make a nose from an egg tray. Paint the face. Outline the eyes and mouth. Make hair from strips of magazine paper. Tape the clown’s head on the first box. Then make a bow tie with ribbon.
Game: Each player gets 5 plastic bottle caps. Take turns to throw caps one by one into the Clown’s eyes (twenty points) or mouth (ten points)

3. Make toy vehicles. Materials needed: Empty matchboxes, round buttons, glue, paints or crayons, mineral water bottle covers.

Decide which vehicles you want to make – cars, lorries, trucks, etc. Use buttons or bottle covers as wheels. Glue these on the matchboxes. Then colour the matchboxes. Use different colours to draw lines to show doors, windows and steering wheel. For lorries and trucks, paste another matchbox on top. Stimulating because children can open up the parts and then glue them back and learn about the parts of vehicles. –

4. Counting beads. Cut up empty toilet rolls into rings (1” wide). Paint and number them. Then let your child thread these rings onto a shoelace or piece of string. This helps with co-ordination and counting skills.

5. Poke-a-peg. Turn an egg carton (recycled paper type) upside down and punch small holes, just enough to fit a clothes peg in the bottom of each section. Let your child enjoy pushing in the clothes peg and taking it out again!

CLICK HERE for more activities for toddlers.

________________________________________________________

Children’s learning styles

Learning styles are the ways we learn. We are either visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners which means we need to see, hear, or “do” what we want to learn.

Research shows that especially young children learn faster when using their individual learning style. In fact, children who really haven’t “learned to learn by which method ever” are even more depended to learn this way. While adults have learned in school to memorize things which way ever, young children are only getting started. Therefore they can learn so much better when using their own individual learning style.

Teaching anything without taking advantage of this latest research is like driving a VW bug from the 60ties on Daytona International Speedway. That is especially true for learning the ABCs. Everybody will agree with me that children cannot read without learning the letters. The longer that takes and the more uncomfortable that is the less likely it is that this child will become a happy reader.

Most of us, including children, learn best via visual learning. That means that the student has to SEE what s/he is supposed to learn.

The next largest group of learners is the group of kinesthetic learners, which is a complicated word for hands-on learners.

Very few children are especially gifted because they are auditory learners. It is a wonderful gift because they just listen and “get it”. Wouldn’t we all like to learn this way? Go to meeting, listen to the speaker and then be able to remember everything?

In reality we are all “mixed” learners, e.g. I am a 75% visual, 20% kinesthetic, and 5% auditory learner.

If you are teaching your child ABC, the following is a book that uses all the above learning styles to help your child identify the names of the letters, the shapes and sounds. Click HERE to teach ABC to your child the fun way !

_________________________________________________________

Christmas Holiday Gifts

Christmas is only a month away. Remember to choose your gifts early taking into account the time for shipping and handling to ensure that your gifts arrive on time.

Books makes great gifts. Click HERE to get savings up to 70% off on great books.

__________________________________________________________

If you find any of the above articles useful, feel free to forward it to your friends.

If a friend forwarded this to you, you may want to subscibe to this ezine yourself and have future issues sent directly to your mailbox. Please subscribe HERE.

If you have any comments about this newsletter, please email us at: newsletter@parentingtoddlers.com

See you in the next issue. :-)